Back to Adelaide!

I’m really looking forward to joining in at the EdTechSA conference coming up on 15-16 July.

Warm-up Poll – Gathering Data

Session 1 (9:45) – Next Era Ed Readiness Check

Session 2 (2:45) – How Hobsons’ Edumate Accelerates Next Era Ed

If you’re interested in how one software platform integrates the phases of Next Era Ed, come to this session and we’ll explore it together.

Closing Keynote (Thursday) (3:30) – How Ready is your School for Next Era Ed?

I’ve been talking about this for many years and this presentation will take a reflective dip in order to encourage strong action to create a reality that is not only possible, but “imperative.”

NextEraEd_600

 

Next Era Ed @ ECAWA

Hello!

How great to be back in Perth!  I’m really pleased to return to the ECAWA conference to see old friends and meet new ones.  During the conference I’ll be presenting:

the following sessions:

Snapshot Poll

 

 

Friday Sessions

The Five Steps to Next Era Ed

  1. Vision – is it articulated and shared?
  2. Evidence – exactly what does achievement of the Vision look like?
  3. Pedagogies – do you have research-based models to get you there?
  4. Curriculum 2.0 – are your units designed to leverage the models & ICTs?
  5. Process – have you closed the loop for continuous improvement?

Take the Next Era Ed Readiness Check?

Vision & Evidence

Pedagogies / Psychology Research

Curriculum 2.0

CEQ•ALL

Frameworks / Processes

  • Understanding by Design / Schooling by Design
  • Curriculum Mapping
  • High Reliability Schools

ECAWA 2015

ecawa-logoIt’s with a real sense of pleasure, enthusiasm and anticipation that I return to Perth to present at the ECAWA conference this year.  Special thanks to Lynley McKernan and the whole conference committee for welcoming me in my new role with Hobsons Edumate.  I will do three sessions, a keynote on Thursday and two sessions on Friday.  The keynote and one session will be on Next Era Ed and how to get there while one session will highlight how Hobsons Edumate facilitates the journey.  I’m also looking forward to catching up with the other conference keynoters: long-time colleague Dr Tim Kitchen and Dr. Michael Henderson.  If you are in WA, I encourage you to join us all at Scotch College in Swanbourne for what is always a stimulating experience.

My Professional Journey circa 2015

Overview

My goal has long been to help educators and schools nurture meaningful student achievement.  Often this includes a conceptual shift from teacher-delivered lessons to student-driven learning.  I’ve spent decades working on this problem and would like to use this post to describe how I’ve come to what is a new chapter in my professional life.

The Past

This journey begins when I was a classroom teacher, integrating word processing, multimedia and desktop publishing into circa 1990s high school English classes. District technology mentorships and other recognition at the time indicated that my attempts were viewed positively. Yet I was fortunate enough to work as an occasional teacher education instructor at the time which exposed me to the latest learning theories. These helped me see the fil-bluewebnweaknesses in my classroom units and inspired me to get a Masters degree in Instructional Design.  After almost a decade I left the classroom because I wanted to focus on creating the best learning experiences I could.  This was the period, 1994-97, was when I worked with Professor Bernie Dodge to develop the WebQuest approach and I went on to articulate other formats to integrating the Web into rich and authentic learning experiences.  I mention this phase of my career because it relates to this post’s topic in two ways.  First, Understanding by Design was the assigned text for one of the courses Bernie and I team taught, thereby immersing me in the work of Wiggins and McTighe early on. Second, you can see that my focus was on designing and developing classroom learning activities: thus curriculum, not technology.  More about why this is significant shortly.

 As the Years Passed

After leaving the university and moving to Australia, it was only natural to keep developing Web-based learning strategies. This early flurry of work included model activities like Searching for China and Eyes on Art as well on the online design environment called Web-and-Flow. My main audience were other “pioneers” in Web-based learning and authentic education and we wanted to “push the boundaries” to create inspiringly rich and meaningful learning activities for our students.  But there was a problem.  And the problem has only grown as technology has gone from “emerging” to “ubiquitous.”  The problem is that to make any real difference, “rich and meaningful learning activities” can’t be a “one-off” or something students did in 6th grade with Ms Tech-Savvy.  The problem is analogous to when one teacher tries to enforce a rule the rest of the staff tacitly ignore: students adapt to the dominant culture.  So many early adopters of ICT-enhanced learning discovered that most students had learned and preferred the easy path of “playing school: you pretend this is learning and we’ll pretend to learn.”  Back in 2001 I explored this challenge in an article titled “Re-Tooling Schooling” and it denotes a shift in my thinking and focus.  Yes, I want students in a classroom to engage in great learning activities, but as someone who wants to make a real difference, I realised that the only solutions from this point on had to be systemic.  If a whole school or system wasn’t transforming itself, the spirit of inquiry would find it hard to flourish in a culture of passivity.  So where are we now?

The Present (The Problem)

Unfortunately, as technology has gone from emergent to ubiquitous, it has failed to make significant differences in shifting schools from teacher-delivered lessons to student-driven learning.  I have two theories for this.  The first I call “tech’s appeal” and fully intend the rhyme with sex appeal. Because of the amazing advances we’ve all experienced through new technologies, we’ve been smitten by a kind of collective mystique that some new gadget or software will achieve the desired transformation.  We’re blown away that Walkmen have become iPods that have become smartphones that have become cameras that have become GPS transmitters that have become friend finders, that have become watches, that will become…?  So in education we swoon before tech’s appeal, wanting to believe the same magic will transform school-based learning. We fall for the allure and buy computer labs, videodisc players, CD-ROM encyclopedias, interactive whiteboards, iPod Touches, clickers, iPads, eTexts, course management systems, and try HTML, blogs, QR codes, YouTube, podcasts and TED Talks.  And on and on…  But things haven’t changed fundamentally.  Maybe the technologies aren’t really “there” yet, but there’s a second problem besides blind faith in the power of technology.

The Second Problem

Education has Attention Deficit Disorder.  I base this on the multiple messages I receive everyday from my educational networks. Posts, links, tweets and emails buzz constantly about “the new:” gadgets, apps, ideas.  The current flavors are PBL, STEM/STEAM, Maker Movement, coding, gamification…  Don’t get hung-up on these examples because they are no better or worse than the dozens of others that buzz about the press daily. Over the years other such ideas have borne the weight of high expectations for improving schools: flipped classrooms, PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) or SOLEs (Self Organising Learning Environments). Rather than change education, these good ideas and frameworks have probably yielded nothing more than Educational Attention Deficit Disorder.  See if you don’t feel like our friends below:


 

How are we meant to engage in any substantial transformation when we’re buried by a stream of constant “good ideas” and “necessities?”  We have to focus.  And be honest: if an easy answer or silver bullet solution were out there – one that really produced the results we want – in this age of instant communications we would all hear about it and re-tweet exponentially so that schools everywhere would be transforming with the virality of funny cat animations. So what is the honest truth?

The Honest Truth

Like any human organisation, education is a complex endeavour with many interconnected parts. Even knowing where to begin the work of transforming schools is a challenge. The video above illustrates that. So the problem is not a shortage of good ideas. After many years wrestling with this, I’ve come to believe we lack three things: a focused vision, a worthy process and sustained effort.

A Focused Vision

I’ve written elsewhere about recommended steps and benefits of clear and focused vision, so I won’t labour the point here, but let’s highlight the obvious: unless we’re sure where we’re headed, we’ll never get where we want to go.  The twists and turns, detours and distractions, are too numerous.  Similarly, if everything’s urgent, we’ll never get to the essential.

 Understanding and other worthy processes

The business world long ago realised the importance of a process for continuous improvement. Things like Total Quality Management (TQM) turned Japanese cars from flimsy to first-class in a generation. Unfortunately, most schools continue to operate based mostly on habits and engrained patterns.  Being the complex places they are also makes it tough to know which processes to use as the lever for change.  Amidst the buzzing of new ideas and Ed Tech ADD distractions, it probably sounds like the oldest, most boring solution, but there is one aspect to schooling that touches every student and teacher in every grade level and course: our curriculum. Unfortunately, I’ve found that an impoverished definition of curriculum often prevents this powerful tool from realising its potential.  Start with the vision: what amazing things do we want our students to achieve?  what does successful achievement look like?  Let’s make authentic performance of these achievements the heart of our curriculum.  To encourage success, let’s be specific about success criteria and provide samples of such achievement by previous students.  These measures are the kind of assessments that guide students and empower their ownership of learning.

jmctighe-tmarch-bangkokEducation is fortunate that we have evidence-based processes to use.  My preferred frameworks are Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding and Schooling by Design®, Robert Marzano’s High Reliability Schools and integrations of research by folks like John Hattie and the team at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  Each provide processes that, used over time with quality-reviews, can empower a school’s continuous improvement.

My Best Chance to Make a Difference

Having arrived at this point, 2013-2014 was a period where I explored avenues where I could apply the above learnings to make the biggest difference.  This included a time in Cambodia working on the senior education team at a lapp-farewellrge NGO as well as focused-upskilling on my part with Jay McTighe who’s been generous and gracious in supporting my expertise in Understanding by Design to the extent that I am now a member of the McTighe & Associates Consulting group and we have co-authored an article.

However, as a pioneer (e.g., Filamentality) and believer in the power of smart software to accelerate what I call Next Era Ed, I entered into discussions with companies who support a richer view of curriculum.  My thinking was that working for the right company on a good team who was committed to evolving a “smart digital environment,”  I would be in contact with many more schools in an ongoing partnership as they develop their use of the software to continuously improve the achievement of their vision.  Fortunately, through a lucky synchronicity of timing and opportunity, I joined Hobsons at the beginning of 2015 as the lead consultant for teaching and learning.  What set Hobsons Edumate apart edumate-logowas that rather than only curriculum mapping, they offer a unified system of what I call “closed loop” curriculum: vision > unit design > online learning space > rich student assessment > back around to vision and unit design with revisions based on students’ actual performance.  So more than a “written” curriculum, we move past the “taught curriculum” and capture the “learned curriculum.”   In my role I essentially provide my “strategic friend” consulting, but also influence software design and help school leaders with pedagogical integration and change management.

After working mostly alone since starting ozline.com in 1998, it’s a joy to be part of an enthusiastic team, driven by a passion for helping schools to authentically move from “schooling” and “teachers” to “learning” and “students.”  We’ve wanted this for decades and now, with 1:1 devices and evidence-based pedagogies, we can make the dream a reality.

More PISA Support for “Understanding”

The recent release of results on PISA’s new assessment of Problem-Solving skills in participating countries supports a curriculum focused on deeper understanding and being able to transfer those conceptual understandings to new situations. The graph below (and the pages that follow it) illustrate the demand in three representative countries for skills in analysing and problem-solving over performing routine cognitive and manual skills.

PISA-Problem-solving Graphs

Consider referring colleagues in education to this information if they persist in the false belief that society wants students who can recall memorised information of perform basic skills.  As the executive summary of the report states, “In modern societies, all of life is problem-solving.

Free eBook Launched

Brutal_Truths_coverI’d like to announce the official launch of my new eBook, Brutal Truths for Schools.  For those who have seen me present, this eBook is part one of my “It’s broken, so Let’s Fix it” theme.  I thought I’d put all the “bad news” (it’s broken) into one work.  This way, it’s a starting point for those who haven’t confronted the reality that, as the sub-title states, “Education Fails Students in our Digital Age.”

My thinking is that the main readers will come from three audiences.  First, anyone new to the profession or in a teacher ed course currently.  These folks need to know that the schools of their near future do not need people who will prop-up a broken model, but who will grow into the next era of education where schools promote intrinsic motivation and personal learning.  The second audience is educational leaders who are already advocating and realizing the power of digital learning, not assembly line schooling.  You folks might find something useful in my 10 Truths.  Lastly, those teachers – whatever their age or years in teaching – who refuse to confront reality and grow their practice.  For these folks, the Truths are indeed brutal.

I encourage you to download the eBook for FREE and view it on your iPad or Mac laptop.  There is a Kindle version, but it is text only and will cost you .99 cents.

Please use this blog post, twitter or the user reviews at the iTunes store to give me feedback.

 

Engaged is Nice, but not Enough

What do Students Need to Succeed?

When students have 1:1 access to digital resources, the traditional role of the teacher as information source is “disintermediated.” This doesn’t mean that students never need a teacher, or that educators don’t have a critical role in 21st Century learning, but it acknowledges that a good portion of student learning will take place via 1:1 interactions with digital resources and environments. You may be an evangelist of self-empowered learning and think this is great or you may be a champion for the classic bodies of knowledge and cringe at the missed opportunities and misunderstandings that await unguided innocents. Both views are slightly beside the point: students will and do directly access the world’s wealth of information – whether we like it or not has no impact on the reality.

What we must do is analyze the situation to determine, “Okay, if this is the way it is, what will help students be successful?” I suggest three traits: self-initiative, critical thinking and an appetite for lifelong learning.

Self-initiative

Without self-initiative, no one’s really driving the cursor. Without larger goals and a little focus, the digital world is hardly more than the latest, greatest “timesuck.”  Conversely, those who take advantage of online opportunities have a purpose and put their interest into action.

Critical Thinking

The second necessary trait for disintermediated learning is critical thinking. In the early days of the Web, people quickly recognized the unreliable nature of what’s published when anyone can write and post a Web page. As examples, we highlighted sites on Martin Luther King, Jr. served by white supremacists and the imminent agricultural threat to the world’s Velcro crops. With the coming of Web 2.0 and an explosion of user-generated content, these Web 1 cautions look reassuringly obvious in a world of blogs, wikis and videos. Thus the ability to analyze and evaluate what we read, see and hear is essential. But another dimension of critical thinking is ultimately more important than deciphering veracity and reliability. This is the ability to learn. The aspect of critical thinking required here is the richer notion of “making meaning.”  It involves what many have termed “habits of mind,” “dispositions of thinking” or “dimensions of learning.”  Each of these robust contributions to pedagogy vary in the particulars, but share an appreciation that thinking is a complex activity that invokes an array of attributes. Critical thinking in the Digitial World is not a simple formula for “evaluating Web sites.”

Lifelong Learning

The third trait necessary to succeed in a 1:1 digital environment is an appetite for lifelong learning. As important as we feel our subjects and content areas are, the new reality is that students live in a 24/7 connected world where the only certainty is change. What we define as essential learning will go through infinite permutations over the next decades. If content doesn’t change due to new discoveries in the arts and sciences, the methods for engaging with the learning will certainly evolve as it has already from clunky online courses to slick personalized feeds. To be successful, our students need to be open to such opportunities, even welcome change as a means to rewarding and ongoing growth.

So self-initiative, critical thinking and lifelong learning are essential. Without the first, this richest library since the days of Alexandria is lost. Without the second, it’s meaningless. Without the third, there is no future. Students who lack the characteristics to be self-learners will blob along blithely into adulthood. Because we care about students and want to do our part, we ratchet-up our resolve and do what we do best. But here’s the problem. “Teaching” is useless in helping students become self-initiated, critical thinking, lifelong learners. Can you “teach” someone to take initiative? While we might teach some critical thinking strategies, the more complex and idiosyncratic aspects of making meaning don’t fit into a fifty-minute, five-step lesson plan. Finally, the desire to pursue learning for a lifetime isn’t an instructional event. Thus, the most important keys to student success in the digital era aren’t helped by what we do best. So what do we do? Fortunately our colleagues in university research centers have some answers that we’ll explore in the next chapter. But before that, to validate the traits that I’ve suggested students need to be successful, let’s look at what’s already happening…

The Web disrupts (20th Century) “Learning”

If you don’t believe we need a different approach to “teaching” given the richness of the Web and digital technologies, take a look at three ways the Web has already undermined a “teaching” approach to “learning.” If mass production is the model and information the piece that needs attaching, then it makes sense to determine success by measuring how much of the new information is ultimately attached or transferred. With something concrete like information, content or correct answers, we know exactly what we are looking for. From the earliest days of the Web, we could see three aspects inherent in this new medium that would undermine the notion that demonstrating possession of new information or right answers indicated learning. These are: facile plagiarism, spot knowledge and the information explosion.

Exponential Plagiarism

For the current purpose, it’s obvious that the Web facilitates plagiarism: new information or correct answers no longer necessarily come from within the student, but could have just as easily been retrieved for the teacher without altering any synapses in the minds of the learner. New industries have been built attempting to detect plagiarism, and while sophisticated data mining and analysis is fundamental to the Digital Age, using the power of technology to prop up a decidedly limited vision of “knowledge” is a waste of time and effort. As educators we should invest our professional expertise in revisiting our goals for learning and devising tasks that require more than copy/paste keystrokes to complete.  We’ve had the Web for about two decades – what was that earlier remark about human institutions being slow to change?

Spot Knowledge

The second way the Web undermines a “learning as the recitation of answers” view is what James Fallows calls “spot knowledge.”  This highlights a positive attribute of the Web where, a decade after inception, enough people have posted every different kind of knowledge that, to quote the Urban Dictionary, we can “access unanticipated areas of knowledge quickly and efficiently.”  Thus, unlike the problem with plagiarism, spot knowledge doesn’t challenge how we check for achievement of learning, but calls into question the very nature of what we’re asking students to do. Learning is a cognitively taxing endeavor. Whether you look to Piaget’s assimilation and accommodation, Bloom’s taxonomy or later theorists’ construction of meaning, all emphasize that developing new knowledge is hard work. Given the degree of difficulty – and the relative ease of accessing spot knowledge – don’t we owe it to our students to be very careful and selective about what information actually needs to reside in the minds of learners and which can live just as happily “out sourced” or available “on-demand?”  On days when cynicism gets the better of me, I relax in appreciation of the “Forgetting Curve,” the century-old understanding that reveals that without repetition or reinforcement of what is newly learned, we forget 80% of it. On less cynical days I appreciate just how important it is for us to choose wisely and teach effectively so that the remaining 20% is significant and worth remembering. Regardless, it’s the rare curriculum initiative that recognizes the reality of easily accessed spot knowledge and instead we see vested interests continue to heap-up the content of already bloated syllabi and curricula.

Information Explosion

The third way the Web undermines current assembly line concepts of learning relates to the two previous, but presents a different challenge. Yes, a basic information acquisition approach invites plagiarism. And Spot knowledge calls into question the appropriateness of asking students to commit large amounts of easily accessed information to memory. But, thirdly, the very explosion of information that makes plagiarism easy and spot knowledge accessible also highlights an essential skill this new environment requires and we would be remiss if we didn’t address. The need to sort and make sense of this explosion also points us in a better direction for using the Web to support classroom-based learning. When so much information is so readily available, accessing it is nowhere near as important as doing something with it once you’ve found it. Thus rather than repeat back little bits that are easy to cheat on and just as easy to forget (or find when you might happen to need them), making something from this wealth of information and adding it to a growing body of knowledge that is personally meaningful and useful becomes not only a good idea, but essential. Essential that is, if we are to help students do something worthwhile with this new default of 1:1 digital access.

The Web Requires Real “Learning”

This section started with the assertion that successful learning in a rich digital environment requires self-initiative, critical thinking and an appetite for lifelong learning. Having just seen how plagiarism, spot knowledge and the information explosion are (not) being dealt with in most classrooms and curricula, notice how the three line-up.  If students today, in our 20th Century schools had positive self-initiative, plagiarism wouldn’t be an issue.  Certainly acts of plagiarism may tap into self-initiative, but this is to circumvent uninspiring and extrinsically motivated tasks.  Similarly, spot knowledge becomes the raw data for critical thinking if we cared to alter our assignments.  Finally, in a world where accessing exploding information is like “sipping from a firehose,” the best option for managing the overflow is as a lifelong learner whose interests shape the data as needed.  Even though developing students with these positive traits has always been worthwhile, it looks like it took the Web throwing a wrench into the Assembly Line to make it necessary.

A sad fact is that while schools can make the curriculum adjustments to support such cognitive development, they play an active and tragic role endangering students’ mental health.  We explore this serious threat in the next chapter.

Learning Reflection

Too often when teachers talk about “learning” they’re really talking about “school.”  So I use this short guided professional reflection to give everyone a felt sense of that great joyous feeling that is learning.

Reflection on “Learning” from Tom March on Vimeo.

Or just listen to the audio:

Visiting Northern Beaches Christian School

Died and Gone to Heaven NBCS

Yesterday I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for over a year.  Ages ago, I began hearing through the grapevine of a school in northern Sydney that was really taking on integration of Moodle.  As few schools were getting beyond the install/die-on-the-vine phase, I filed the name Northern Beaches Christian School away as one to look into.  Then last year, many of the participants at the CEFPI conference I keynoted came back from day visits to NBCS raving about what they had seen.

Finally, when the team I’ve been working with at Launceston Church Grammar School came back from touring several Sydney area schools, they said one that really impressed them was Northern Beaches. Because I’m looking forward to an on-going partnership with Launceston Grammar, this prompted me to make the drive up. So I contacted Anne Knock, director of development, and she generously set up a time when we could chat and she could take me around the school. That was yesterday.

I’m guessing that this a the first of what might be several-to-many posts celebrating the great things going on at NBCS. So I’ll be brief and simply bullet out a few of the things that most impressed me.

  • Every student I saw was engaged. Some were working in groups, others in pairs, some alone.
  • If they weren’t in the industry-standard design & tech work space, art studio or a playing field, students were using their BYO device without any dramas.
  • Teachers were relaxed, respectful and focused on individual or small group learning (meaning – supporting differentiated student learning).
  • Students were relaxed, respectful and focused on individual or small group learning (meaning – pursuing personal growth).
  • Of course the architecture, learning spaces and furniture all announce a game-changing from “playing school” to something different.  It’s refreshing to get out of the school boxes.
  • All of this to say what everyone knows when they spend even a short time at a great school – this is the real thing: the joy of learning’s happening here.

BCE – Teacher Librarians Big Day Out

What a Great Big Day Out!

The Brisbane Catholic Education Teacher Librarians have organised their “Big Day Out” conference during this Catholic Education Week.  Over a hundred TLs will gather to explore the BCE’s new Life Learning Management System, the Overdrive digital library system as well as unpack my Next Era Education.  After a keynote, I have the great opportunity to meet with all attendees in 40 minute sessions to follow-up on helping the ideas take root in each TLs home soil.

While we get ready, how about going to this Etherpad page to brainstorm the Challenges you face and ideas and questions that might arise.

As per usual, here are helpful links:

Pedagogy

Tom’s Models

Look to Learn

The Tumblr Twist

To “Work the Web” for education, we need a flexible space that empowers us to easily work with rich media. Our first stop will be Tumblr.

Full Tumblr Tutorial page – new!

The ClassPortal

References:

For Ideas & Inspiration

WebQuests

C E QA LL / Seek all!

Self-managed Learning Framework for students